Backblaze: 8-terabyte drives fail less often

Online storage service Backblaze has published the failure rates of its hard drives in 2016. The figures show that the 8TB models fail less often on average than smaller drives. The number of disk failures in general has decreased compared to previous years.

The service has shared both the figures for the whole of 2016 and the specific figures for the fourth quarter. In that quarter, 1.65 percent of the 8-terabyte drives failed, compared to the 1.94 percent average across all drives. The vast majority of 8-terabyte drives that Backblaze uses are Seagate consumer models, the ST8000DM002. The rest of the 8-terabyte models were a model from HGST and a business drive from Seagate. These two models did not have a single dropout in 2016.

Backblaze decided in 2016 to phase out all drives smaller than 3TB. As a result, there are no more statistics for these figures. A drive that has failed remarkably often is the ST4000DX000, with 13.57 percent. However, this disc is on average more than three years old. On the other hand, there are several 3-terabyte models of HGST, which, despite a higher average age, have broken less often. The company previously operated a large number of Seagate 3-terabyte drives, many of which failed. This has led to a lawsuit against Seagate.

Despite the fact that Seagate has suffered considerable image damage due to the failure rates, the manufacturer is not described as the most unreliable this year. That crown goes to Western Digital, of whom 3.88 percent of all drives failed. HGST, which is owned by WDC, remains the most trusted manufacturer, with a failure rate of 0.6 percent.

In general, the hard drives at Backblaze seem to fail less often than in previous years. While it may appear that the failure rate of the 8-terabyte models has fallen sharply, Backblaze reports that only 45 drives were tested in 2015, with two of them failing. Backblaze will be holding an online seminar on February 2 that takes a closer look at the statistics.